Crucial Confrontations: Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior
Author: Kerry Patterson
The authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations show you how to achieve personal, team, and organizational success by healing broken promises, resolving violated expectations, and influencing good behavior
Discover skills to resolve touchy, controversial, and complex issues at work and at home--now available in this follow-up to the internationally popular Crucial Conversations.
Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you'll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly--and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren't just irritating, they're costly--sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces.
Crucial Confrontations teaches skills drawn from 10,000 hours of real-life observations to increase confidence in facing issues like:
- An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?
- Your boss just committed you to a deadline you know you can't meet--and not-so-subtly hinted he doesn't want to hear complaints about it.
- Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by forty points. Speak now, pay later.
- An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law.Can you spell unemployment?
- Family members fret over how to tell granddad that he should no longer drive his car. This is going to get ugly.
- A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers "how things work around here" and decides not to say anything.
Everyone knows how to run for cover, or if adequately provoked, step up to these confrontations in a way that causes a real ruckus. That we have down pat. Crucial Confrontations teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand, and doesn't harm the relationship--and in fact, even strengthens it.
Crucial Confrontations borrows from twenty years of research involving two groups. More than 25,000 people helped the authors identify those who were most influential during crucial confrontations. They spent 10,000 hours watching these people, documented what they saw, and then trained and tested with more than 300,000 people. Second, they measured the impact of crucial confrontations improvements on organizational and team performance--the results were immediate and sustainable: twenty to fifty percent improvements in measurable performance.
Soundview Executive Book Summaries
Behind the problems that regularly plague families, teams and organizations are individuals who either can't or won't deal with failed promises. The reason is that they're afraid to talk face to face about difficult but important issues - and as their fear of confrontation prevents them from resolving these issues, simple problems grow into chronic problems.
By learning how to deal with challenging confrontations, you'll learn to avoid the typical, but unconstructive, response of slipping either into awkward silence or embarrassing violence.
Mastering crucial confrontations requires a skill set. In Crucial Confrontations, consultant Kerry Patterson and executive coach Joseph Grenny join forces with their fellow researchers and trainers Ron McMillan and Al Switzler to help others develop the skills it takes to resolve the most pressing problems, including quality violations, safety infractions, cost-cutting mistakes, and medical errors. The authors write that their research shows that most organizations are losing between 20 and 80 percent of their potential performance because they have not mastered crucial confrontations.
The skills for mastering crucial confrontations can be learned; the authors of Crucial Confrontations show you how.
What Is A Crucial Confrontation?
Sarah, the head nurse at the Pine Valley Medical Center in northwestern Washington, stands frozen as doctors discuss the treatment of an elderly patient. Years of experience have taught Sarah two things: One, the patient probably needed an immediate and large dose of antibiotics, and two, even though the doctors were discussing a treatment that didn't involve antibiotics, Sarah would keep her mouth shut.
Years earlier, fresh out of college, Sarah had cheerfully disagreed with the three doctors she had been assisting. They stopped dead in their tracks and looked at her as if she were a cockroach on a wedding cake. In one poignant moment that was forever burned into her psyche, the rules had been made clear to Sarah: Don't disagree with a physician - ever. Now, nearly two decades and hundreds of confirming incidents later, she stands by wondering: Will the doctors do what I believe they should do, or will they come to the same conclusion too late? She doesn't wonder if she should speak up. Sarah's expectations weren't met, and in response she has resorted to silence.
Silence and Violence
Staring into the face of a possible disaster, some people are caught in agonizing silence. Rather than speak directly and frankly about the problem at hand, they drop hints, change the subject, or actually withdraw from the interaction altogether. Fear drives them to various forms of silence and their point of view is never heard - except maybe as gossip or rumor.
Others break away from their tortured inaction only to slip into violence. Frightened at the thought of not being heard, they try to force their ideas on others. They cut people off, overstate arguments, attack ideas, employ harsh debate tactics, and eventually resort to insults and threats. Fear drives them to do violence to the discussion and their ideas are often resisted.
We all face crucial confrontations. We set clear expectations, but the other person doesn't live up to them - we feel disappointed. Lawyers call these incidents breaches of contract. What do you do when someone disappoints you? You could choose violence, or you could opt for another choice, like Sarah, and choose silence. But there is a method that falls somewhere between the polar worlds of fight and flight. Mastering crucial confrontations allows you to deal with failed promises, disappointments and other performance gaps.
Unless you step up to and master crucial confrontations, nothing will get better. It will be a skill set, not a policy, which will enable you to solve pressing problems.
If you can't effectively confront violated expectations, you eventually experience massive personal, social and organizational consequences. If you can't deal with performance gaps, you'll either fight or take flight. Productivity will run at half of what it should.
If you learn how to hold people accountable in a way that solves problems without causing new ones, you can look forward to significant and lasting change.
When you confront, you hold someone accountable, face to face. When confrontations are handled correctly, both parties are candid, open, honest and respectful. As a result, problems are resolved and relationships benefit. Crucial confrontation skills offer the best chance to succeed - no matter the topic, person or circumstance.
Learn how to hold crucial confrontations and you'll never have to walk away from another conflict again.
Table of Contents:
| Foreword | xiii |
| Preface | xvii |
| Acknowledgments | xviii |
| Introduction: What's a Crucial Confrontation? And Who Cares? | 1 |
| Part 1 | Work on Me First: What to Do before a Crucial Confrontation | 23 |
| Ch. 1 | Choose What and If: How to Know What Crucial Confrontation to Hold and If You Should Hold It | 25 |
| Ch. 2 | Master My Stories: How to Get Your Head Right before Opening Your Mouth | 55 |
| Part 2 | Confront with Safety: What to Do during a Crucial Confrontation | 81 |
| Ch. 3 | Describe the Gap: How to Start a Crucial Confrontation | 83 |
| Ch. 4 | Make It Motivating: How to Help Others Want to Take Action | 113 |
| Ch. 5 | Make It Easy: How to Make Keeping Commitments (Almost) Painless | 145 |
| Ch. 6 | Stay Focused and Flexible: What to Do When Others Get Sidetracked, Scream, or Sulk | 171 |
| Part 3 | Move to Action: What to Do after a Crucial Confrontation | 199 |
| Ch. 7 | Agree on a Plan and Follow Up: How to Gain Commitment and Move to Action | 201 |
| Ch. 8 | Put It All Together: How to Solve Big, Sticky, Complicated Problems | 217 |
| Ch. 9 | The Twelve "Yeah-Buts": How to Deal with the Truly Tough | 231 |
| Appendix A | Where Do You Stand? A Self-Assessment for Measuring Your Crucial Confrontation Skills | 253 |
| Appendix B | Six-Source Diagnostic Questions: The Six-Source Model | 258 |
| Appendix C | When Things Go Right | 262 |
| Appendix D | Discussion Questions for Reading Groups | 269 |
| Notes | 271 |
| Index | 273 |
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The Greatest Salesman In The World
Author: Og Mandino
What you are today is not important... for in this runaway bestseller you will learn how to change your life by applying the secrets you are about to discover in the ancient scrolls.
Publishers Weekly
This is a sequel to Mandino's 1967 bestselling parable about Hafid, a camel boy who happened upon a young couple and their shivering infant. Carrying a red cloak, which his master had instructed him to sell, ok?he generously wrapped it around the child, who was the infant Jesus. Impressed by this generous gesture, Hafid's master gave him scrolls containing 10 straightforward principles for achieving personal and professional success. Part two begins as aging Hafid of Damascus, now the greatest salesman in the world, languishes after the death of his ``loving woman.'' To rejuvenate himself, Hafid undertakes a speaking tour to enlighten others about the 10 principles. During this journey, Hafid learns that the man he gave the scrolls, Jesus' apostle Paul, lost them in a shipwreck. Just before he dies, Hafid goes to hallowed Mt. Hermon, where God addressed Jesus, and creates new scrolls for posterity. At this point, Mandino explains each of the 10 rules in simple, reasonable prose. Among other things, he exhorts his disciples to eschew self-pity, establish goals, behave amiably and actively seek new opportunities. While his inspirational message is banal, the author communicates so lucidly and persuasively that those who enjoyed his first book will undoubtedly find this one equally appealing. Major ad/promo; author tour. (March)
Library Journal
This sequel to Mandino's 1967 self-help classic features the same amalgam of biblical motifs and secular values as its predecessor. As the new story opens, an older Hafid (who rose from camel boy to ``greatest salesman'' in the original) is mourning his wife, oblivious to the needs of others, until a stranger directs him toward a new career preaching to the masses on the subject of success. On his travels he meets biblical figures (including St. Paul, languishing in jail till the salesman revives him). Closing with ten ``Vows of Success,'' this is shaky theologically, but a predictable best seller. EC
